


How to Sing a Sorcerer Home

by ryyves



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergent, Gen, I haven't seen s5 yet, Merlin/Gwaine if you're looking for it, Post S4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-01-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:35:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22391122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryyves/pseuds/ryyves
Summary: Gwaine, champion of every ring he has ever stepped into, has learnt to fight for everything he has, but there are things he can only fight for with his voice.
Relationships: Gwaine & Merlin (Merlin)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 39





	How to Sing a Sorcerer Home

**Author's Note:**

> Gwaine singing for his supper was the best part of the s4 finale.

Gwaine sings to survive. In forests with his feet aching in thin-soled boots, he sings. In taverns along every border of the five kingdoms, he sings. He stands on the tables and lets an empty tankard amplify his voice, another sloshing drink across his cheeks. He dazzles, his shirt half undone or torn from the latest rough encounter on the road, no place to call his home, no family waiting. No one waiting but the blue sky, the mountains, the grand world in front of him. It dazzles, too. He steps out the teetering tavern door with his lip split and his ribs cracked and raises his hand against the sun.

His voice goes and he uses his smile, his slender fingers arched into fists. He sweettalks his way out of exorbitant tabs and into barmaids’ bedrooms, but only occasionally. He sings and the world sings back to him, glorious in its cacophony, the voices of those who started the fight and those who didn’t raised in something sweeter than the strumming of a lute, a storyteller’s voice before a village of captivated children. The world sings and he closes his eyes to listen, in all its metalgrate swordscrape glory, the ladybirds he’s found on mornings lazy enough that he could open his eyes and look around before bolting to his feet.

There are more fights he can’t remember than he knows how to count, more black days and black nights, more scars he doesn’t recall getting, just the weeks-long process of nursing them. He’s discarded more shirts than he’s ever bought, torn into scraps for bandages. Half his life he lives in a fugue and the other in laughter so deep he has permanent crow’s feet, and all of it in song.

* * *

So here we have Gwaine rotating his fingers for a captive ladybird, its dark patches a revelation, while Percival shouts orders and Leon bundles up their blankets and straps them on the horses. The noise is not enough to rouse Gwaine, to pull him back to the patrol and the cold, dewy late-spring morning. His hair falls in his face, sticks to his chapped lips, but his elbows are holding him in place and the world is wonderous and red and looking back at him. It tests its wings, the ladybird, and inches toward his thumb, so he raises his other hand before it, enticing it with his nail.

Merlin is at his side, the both of them on their bellies in the dirt. Merlin’s breath is warm, still soft from sleep, and his shoulders and cheekbones brush Gwaine’s.

The world heard his song and gave him Merlin; Gwaine is certain of this. It has answered him with a melody not yet sure of what it is going to become, how loud it will rise above the citadel of Camelot, the woods, the hunting horns, avalanches on the distant peaks. Gwaine can see it; he does not know what he is looking at, but he knows he can’t look away.

If he looks too long, his grin grows so bright he thinks he’s going to end up back where he started.

“Shame we can’t carry it with us,” whispers Merlin, while Arthur shouts his name from somewhere behind them.

“Sure we can.” Gwaine grins at the small insect on his knuckle. “You’re good at taking care of things.”

“I didn’t take you for the sensitive type.”

Gwaine bumps Merlin’s shoulder so hard Merlin almost topples onto his back. “Even a strong, capable, handsome gentleman such as myself can take pleasure in the small beauties of the world.”

Merlin bares his teeth in a grin. Gwaine continues, “Look at them all.” Merlin glances back. “Hurrying about like bugs. Trampling every flower and fern in sight. So impatient to get somewhere, to be something, to prove themselves.”

“Don’t you want that too? To prove yourself?”

Gwaine brings the ladybird closer to his eyes and it shifts on his skin. The sun falls on its back, on his hands, on the warm soil and the underbrush, the sun barely risen but so warm. “It’s not about that. I’ve already proven myself more than I ever let myself dream. A title like Sir Gwaine doesn’t come around that often. But it’s not what my whole life was heading toward.”

He feels Merlin shrug against him, as best as he can do with his elbows braced on the earth.

“There isn’t anything more that I want.” There is a bitterness in Gwaine’s voice, a longing, but he keeps talking. Merlin alone pulls out the honest part of him. “I have the best band of brothers(1) this world has ever seen. And what’s more, I have you. Now go put this guy somewhere safe before Arthur kills us both and leaves us here in the wild for the bears to devour.”

* * *

Later, Gwaine slows his steed to ride abreast with Merlin. He says, thoughtfully, “I think everybody wants to prove themselves, deep down.” The mountains have risen up around them, some still white at their peaks. Though Gwaine has grown familiar with the weight of chainmail, in this weather he is sweating beneath it all. The path they follow is wide, a caravan route most likely, with a gentle valley sloping away beneath them. A dazzling chain of lakes stretches away across the valley, an uncanny blue.

“So what about you?” Gwaine continues amicably. “What are you trying to prove?”

The response is immediate. “Nothing.”

“Come on.” The laugh saturates every vowel.

“That I’m not a completely useless servant.”

Gwaine looks at Merlin, staring straight ahead to Arthur’s red-clad back. “Really? Then you’re doing a pretty good job of making it look like you _want_ to be a useless servant.”

Merlin glances over without moving his head. His horse shakes hers, snorting around the bit. “That’s just the stupidity showing.” Despite Merlin’s blasé, cheerful tone, there is something haughty in his expression. “Ask Arthur. I’m the most useless servant to ever cross the gates of Camelot.”

Behind Merlin, the mountain rises lush with wildflowers, with berries Gwaine would know if he were two yards closer. They encounter a tiny river of snowfall and the horses splash through it.

“I’m asking you,” Gwaine says seriously.

The midday sun brings beads of sweat to Merlin’s forehead. Merlin ties his horse’s reins low around its neck and holds his hands before him. After two days in the woods, Merlin is as filthy as the rest of them, but for a moment it seems like the sun sits in his palms, leaking from between his outstretched fingers. His horse slows, as though to put more distance between himself and the knights ahead, so Gwaine slows as well.

“Do you ever feel,” says Merlin, then, “No.”

“I do feel _No_ quite a lot of the time.”

“Gwaine, please,” says Merlin, and it is a door shutting – gentle, polite, perhaps, but firm. If it were anyone but Merlin, Gwaine might throw his shoulder against it, might set about to pick the lock. Merlin’s horse picks up speed, and Gwaine watches him go.

So Gwaine sings to Merlin. He sits by Merlin at the fire and lays down his sleeping pad beside Merlin’s. He helps Merlin with the dishes, even when Leon laughs and Arthur tells him to come off it. After a lifetime of rejecting everything nobility stands for, Gwaine knows his way around pots and pans. He collects the dishes from Arthur and the knights and follows Merlin past the edge of the camp.

“Go back,” says Merlin as Gwaine unloads the dishes in his hands. Their hands meet as Gwaine reaches for the scrub, and Merlin’s closes into a fist around it. “You’re a knight.”

“That moniker doesn’t mean I can’t help a friend with his chores. Don’t think I’ve changed that much. I’m not palace born and bred, and I’m going to help you with the dishes.”

Dusk gathers in the canopy, in the corners of Merlin’s smiling eyes They fall into rhythm. Merlin hands the dishes to Gwaine and collects them, and Gwaine scrubs. Gwaine sings with his shoulders as he passes each bowl back; he sings with the dirty palm he raises to brush his hair out of his eye, with the splashes of stew that fall on his chainmail. Merlin grins at him more times than he bothers counting, rolls his arms and stretches out the expected cramps.

Night falls, and they find their way back laughing, Gwaine leaning on Merlin, tripping in the dark but righting themselves every time. They find their way back by moonlight on armor, by the low murmur of the horses and the brook they camped by. The black sky and bright stars sing to them, insects in the trees and the hum of the fire. They stumble into camp alive. Merlin’s eyes and teeth are brighter than the sleeping metal scattered across the campsite, and as Merlin goes to the fire to stoke it, Gwaine sees the open eyes of his brothers and knows he woke them.

Merlin sits beside the fire to take watch and Gwaine pulls his sleeping pad closer, lies down so that his resting arm brushes Merlin’s back. This is perhaps the quietest song he has ever sung. Merlin prods the fire and sparks rise like ladybirds. The heat reaches Gwaine’s exposed cheek, the peak of his nose. One of the sparks comes down inches from his face, and he presses it into the earth.

“A year ago, we were ragtag and hopeless. And brave, so brave. Untested. Wanting to believe in something, wanting to amount to something. And look at us now. We’re almost exactly like people” (2). He falls silent, the ground cold, the sky cold, his hands cold beneath his head. Merlin is silent, too, and Gwaine props himself on his elbows. Merlin’s face is orange before the fire, his eyes dark, one hand tugging on his scarf. Gwaine breathes softly.

With a sigh, Gwaine lays back on his pad and folds his hands behind his head. He could fill scrolls with the music of the sky. He could try to decipher the stars, or the heavy canopy that seeks to block them. There are sleeping flowers all around Gwaine’s head, and he fingers them, presses them against his greasy hair. Merlin shifts against Gwaine’s side, and Gwaine’s stomach tightens. If someone severs the bridge now, he will tumble with no hand to hold onto, too far from the ledge.

“We weren’t,” says Merlin, slowly. “We weren’t monsters. You or I.”

In the distance, a fluttering. An owl calls. One of the horses shakes its head.

“No,” says Gwaine. “I suppose not. But it’s good to know you think so.”

Arthur’s voice comes low and cross. “Go to bed, Merlin, Gwaine.”

Merlin exhales like a laugh, sweet like the light from the palms is inside him.

It is enough for Gwaine to fall asleep with the moon on his eyelids, surrounded by the slowing breaths of his brothers. He has been alone for long enough, he thinks, as Merlin leans more heavily against him. It is enough, he thinks. God, let something be enough.

* * *

The druid camp looks half-finished, clotheslines and tents staked on top of each other like their owners are expecting a quick getaway, no well dug but a wide stream cackling just beyond a ledge. Arthur and his knights shed their cloaks, their crests, before entering. This is the first time since Arthur promised the druids safety and freedom that he has sought them out.

The talks take place out in the open, around a campfire, the druid leaders and the knights interspersed. Merlin fiddles with his hands. Merlin and Gwaine flank Arthur, so Merlin’s erratic movements draw Gwaine’s attention from his king.

When, after perhaps an hour, Arthur says, “Leave us to speak privately,” Merlin all but flees. He is almost at the brook when Gwaine catches him.

Merlin stills and looks over his shoulder, his face tense and still and miserable. “I’m not going anywhere,” he mutters and sits down on a large, flat stone at the water’s edge.

Gwaine picks his way down to the brook. By the time he arrives, Merlin has taken a boot off and is working on the other. He sets them neatly on the stones and rolls up the legs of his trousers. Gwaine sits on a nearby stone with an eddy between them. The water is snowmelt cold, and Merlin’s whole body shivers as he plunges his feet into the water.

Gwaine pulls one knee up to his shoulders and dips the other in. Stones scrape his sole, and he curls his toes in the sudden freeze. The brook is loud enough that they hear nothing from the druid camp: not fires, chatter, dishes clattering, the children so bizarrely well-behaved.

“Not your favorite place in the world, I take it,” Gwaine says.

“You could say that.” Merlin stares at the opposite bank, where the trees grow in a tangle right to the water’s edge, his face inscrutable.

“Have you ever been to a druid camp before?”

Merlin says, “When we took the Cup of Life.”

The water is warmer now around Gwaine’s ankle, so he sinks his other foot in. The stones are smooth and rough, and he rolls them over underneath his toes. Water soaks the hems of his trousers, makes them billow in the current.

“Are you afraid?” Gwaine asks.

“What?” Merlin startles, and the water shifts between them.

“Of the druids.”

Merlin catches a stone between his toes and lifts it out of the stream so he can grab it. Turning it over between his fingers, he says, “No. If anything, they should be afraid of us.”

Overhead, the sun hits them in patches through the trees, warming them in some places, freezing them in others. “Arthur’s not going to go back on his promise of peace.”

There is something tense in Merlin’s voice. “I know he won’t. That’s not it.”

“You’re hiding something,” observes Gwaine.

“I want to tell you,” says Merlin, guarded and plaintive.

“Then tell me.”

“I can’t. Not yet. You’re Arthur’s knight.”

Gwaine wrings his soaking hems and lets them fall back into the current. The cold water eases a day of gripping reins and sitting with his hands in fists while Arthur talked of peace and Gwaine knew they were a threatening presence whatever they had to say.

“And I’m proud to be, even though it’s been difficult to forget all the things I used to believe. Watching Arthur break every selfish tradition of nobility has been something of a miracle.” And then, because he has begun to talk and the river is bubbling like a rhythm, Gwaine says, “I think I wanted someone to belong to. And now that I do, well, whatever kind of knight I’m going to be, I’m proud to be him.” He stares down the river, where a small waterfall turns the gentle current into rapids like boiling water.

“You’re a good knight,” says Merlin.

Gwaine laughs, and he cannot tell whether it is warm or bitter. “There’s still a part of me that feels like I’m lying to everyone, even though I would give everyone one of you my life,” he says, Gwaine, champion of every ring he’s ever stepped into, in the only way he knows how to express devotion, to match Merlin’s song. He is not sure Merlin will pick up the tune.

On the far bank, a cormorant hops among the stones, and dragonflies hum over the water.

And then Merlin picks up the tune.

“My father was a Dragonlord.”

Gwaine’s feet still in the water. Even the dragonflies seem to stop, the whirling branches overhead stilling as though in the thrall of magic. Gwaine’s eyes are on his feet and he cannot move them.

Merlin says, “So I’m a Dragonlord.” His voice is flat, matter-of-fact, as though reaching Gwaine from beyond the bank. The cormorant takes flight.

Gwaine is slow to look over lest he startle Merlin. “You have magic.” There are lines on Merlin’s face that Gwaine has never seen.

“I am magic,” Merlin corrects, bracing his hands on the stone.

The stories bloom outwards, village tales, lullabies, hearsay. For a few years, Gwaine was alive at the same time as the dragons, the hunts well underway by the time of his birth. His mother is singing while a fire burns on the city roofs, while voices scream _dragon!_ and there is no father in sight. His mother says the soldiers knocked the dragon out of the sky and into the woods; its body burned for two weeks straight at the edge of the city, even through rainstorms, and the air smelled of flesh and fire and rot. Gwaine remembers the blight on fields and forests for miles; there were jagged stumps to climb and sit on, soil to be raked with bare fingers and carried home.

He remembers every other window in town broken, the clatter of glass and hooves and raiders with swords swaying on their horses, the army of Camelot that cut Gwaine’s father down. Sometimes Gwaine was the only one who stood in their way, his sword an old thing left behind by a passing patrol of knights. Stolen, maybe, but never admitted. Hidden under his mattress until the dust settled behind the horses’ flicking tails and brought out in secret. He was not yet ten.

It wasn’t the dragons’ fault, but the men from Camelot chased them beyond the kingdom’s borders. To dragons, there were no kingdom lines, the earth divided only by mountain ranges and streams. It wasn’t the dragons’ fault, but Camelot invaded Cendred’s kingdom, Caerleon’s, and Gwaine’s father was still dead, buried somewhere Gwaine would never see. It wasn’t the dragons’ fault that they died.

It wasn’t his mother’s fault that Gwaine was born a bastard, that she couldn’t convince the man to stay.

Meanwhile the kings sat on their thrones and marched the people the people loved most to their graves.

Now, the weight of Merlin’s eyes is heavy on Gwaine’s cheek. Gwaine says, “What do you mean, you are?”

But Gwaine has given Merlin enough time to begin to withdraw, his shoulders tight and high, his gaze intense as he stares through the water.

“You can’t tell Arthur,” Merlin says, rough and raw. His eyes are dark with fear.

“I won’t.”

Merlin presses his lips together and kicks his feet, splashing Gwaine’s calves. “I was magic before I was anything. Before I could talk, or walk, before I could eat solid food. It’s as much a part of me as my fingers are.”

Gwaine says, “Didn’t the Dragonlords round up the dragons and kill them?” He is looking at Merlin, no trace of a smile on his face, eyes lined with worry.

“Yes,” whispers Merlin. “But they didn’t want to. To a Dragonlord, dragons are the most wonderful creatures that exist. That would be like if I offered you, or Arthur, to be slaughtered.”

Gwain wants to ask, _To whom?_ Instead, he cracks a smile and says, to create a moment of reprieve, to alleviate the heavy air around them, “Are you comparing me to a dragon?”

“No,” says Merlin, insistent. “I’m telling you how important they were to them – to us. Take me seriously, take something seriously, for once.”

“I am,” Gwaine snaps. “But if you’re going to write me off, go ahead. I certainly don’t get enough of that from Elyan and Leon.”

“That’s not what I was doing.”

“Wasn’t it?” The smile is still on his face, but it is sour, and Merlin’s eyes keep wrenching away from it to Gwaine’s too-tight lips. “I know people see me the way I want to be seen, but I didn’t think you, of everyone, would believe it too.”

Merlin’s eyes are dark. “Then be quiet and let me talk.”

Gwaine pulls his feet out of the water and they drip all over the rock. In the growing dusk, the river dark as stained glass before them and the trees going blue, Gwaine’s feet are suddenly cold.

“Maybe I’ve had enough of talking.”

“I don’t understand. This isn’t like you.”

Gwaine dries his feet with his socks. “That’s where you’re wrong. This is maybe the most like me that you’ll ever get.”

“You’re wrong,” says Merlin.

“You don’t know that. What do you know about me, really?” Gwaine is pulling on his boots as he speaks, tucking his trousers carefully inside.

“That’s what this is about?”

“I don’t want to be cross with you, Merlin. You’re the closest friend I’ve had in a very long time. But you can’t expect me to be a different person just because you have a secret to confess.”

“No one knows except Gaius,” says Merlin softly, muffled by the space between them. “And now you.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m honored.” Gwaine stands.

Merlin is still looking toward the far bank, the current making waves around his bare legs. “I wanted someone to know. You should understand. You want to be known, too.”

“It’s your secret to tell.”

“And you’re scared that you’ll go to your grave without ever being known.”

Gwaine laughs sourly. “I’d rather go to my grave a good man than anything else.” He still does not turn toward the waiting camp, the plumes of smoke rising through the trees, the sound of his comrades setting up.

Despite the laughter, the hurt in Merlin’s voice pushes against Gwaine like a wave. “Do you think you’re a good man?”

And Gwaine turns, stepping around Merlin’s boots, his hunched back. Merlin looks up at him, face inscrutable. Gwaine says, “I want to be.”

“The people I care about most,” says Merlin. “That’s what I’m saying. That’s what dragons are like.”

“Oh.”

“And I think you’re one of the best men I know.”

Over the hill, Gwaine can hear Arthur’s voice hollering for Merlin, the clatter of cooking pots, fabric rustling on clotheslines. He stops, feet soaking the soles of his boots.

“Look, Gwaine. I’m not asking your secrets. I just want you to listen to mine.”

“I wasn’t trying to brush you aside,” says Gwaine.

Merlin pulls his feet out of the water and rises barefoot. “I need you to see,” he says, and he holds his hand out. He whispers a word like a gust of wind being ripped out of him, clear and soft, and fire grows from the center of his palm. Gwaine stops, entranced. It lights up the trees, the mossy rocks, bounces orange off the swirling pool. And Merlin’s face, his teeth bared with wild and uncontained glee. Gwaine reaches out a finger and draws it through the flame, hot and sudden, and when he pulls back, his finger is reddened. He kneels and places his hand, fingers spread, in the water.

“Thank you,” he says. Merlin says nothing, but his reflection on the river looks back at them, distorted every time Gwaine’s stinging fingers twitch.

“Why would they kill the dragons?” Gwaine says.

“Uther forced them to. Threatened them and their families. I can’t really answer that because I’d never met one until my dad, and because there are only two dragons alive today in all of the five kingdoms.” The fire goes out and blue rushes in.

Gwaine pulls his hand out of the water and dries it on his trousers. A wistful note runs through his voice when he says, “So, Lord, huh? What’s it like, having that much power?”

“You have no idea.”

The secret hangs between them, the air heavy but warmer, now, as though the forest itself is trying to keep them together. Merlin still holds his empty hand in the air, and it is just as full of wonder.

“How did you survive, keeping your magic a secret?”

Merlin’s eyes are dark and shrewd. “How have you survived?”

Gwaine chuckles. “Oh, no, you don’t get to turn this on me.”

But Merlin is not finished prying. “Why would your father be a good knight if you hated all knights?”

“I’ve learned from Arthur that not all knights are pompous and cruel.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” Merlin reaches for Gwaine’s hand, and without realizing, Gwaine twitches back.

“Oh,” says Merlin, very softly.

“No,” says Gwaine, just as softly, and he grabs the hand that a minute ago held fire, holding it in both his own. “That’s not what it is.”

Merlin’s face is pale, his voice desperate, his arms held askew. “I wanted to show you what magic feels like. That it’s not dangerous. That I would never use it to hurt you.”

“It’s because you were prying,” Gwaine insists, forced into vulnerability, forced into song. Forced into singing Merlin back. “You were prying and I didn’t want you to see.”

And Merlin, who gives second chances, says, “Then tell me.”

The night creatures have come out, small things scuttling under bushes and over roots, birds settling into their nests and the occasional owl cry in the distance. Merlin’s hand is stiff in Gwaine’s, and Gwaine doesn’t know if it’s the blood in Merlin or in himself that’s making all this noise.

“It feels like you,” Gwaine says. As ordinary as doing dishes, as ordinary as sharpening blades or cleaning out tankards. As wild and electric as a bar brawl. Gwaine’s wet hands drip onto Merlin’s, Merlin warm after the river. “I trust you with my life. But I don’t know why you trusted me. All my life, I just end up leaving the people I love.”

“Your home.”

“And I did it myself. I did it without anyone telling me to.”

“You’ve been to Ealdor,” says Merlin, and he draws his hand back, palm sliding over palm but the song going on.

Gwaine says, “Your mother was lovely.”

“I left her. I did the same thing. And I watched my best friend die protecting Arthur. For me.”

“But you go back.”

“We’ve both watched people die. It comes with the terrain, I guess: knight, sorcerer. Camelot can’t catch a break. We can’t avoid places because of the blood on them. So tell me. Why don’t you go back?”

Gwaine glances down at his boots. “Let’s take a walk.” He wades into the river, and Merlin follows. They are across in three steps, not long enough for the water to penetrate Gwaine’s boots. On the other side, the cold sets in; on the other side, they seem to enter a different forest, wild and tangled and endless, where the river becomes a barrier between themselves and the druid camp. Gwaine and Merlin turn and walk along the river, where tangled spider bushes hang over the stones. Gwaine’s boots squelch with each step.

“You’re not destined to be like your father any more than Arthur is destined to become Uther,” says Merlin when they can no longer see the glow from the druids’ fires over the hillock.

“That’s easy to say.” Gwaine hooks his thumbs in his belt. They pick their way around overhanging branches and brambles that spread across the small beach to the river itself.

“I say it because I know you. So I know that’s not why you’re pretending.”

Gwaine stumbles and Merlin reaches out to catch him. Their hands look like ghosts in the dark. “What?”

Merlin says, “Why don’t you go back? Why are you always running?”

“I’m not.”

Merlin’s eyes are bright as he wades into the river to avoid a thorny bush. “I’m Gwaine,” he says expansively. “I’ve had a few more drinks than I should and started a fight in every tavern in Albion. I have a bounty on my head in at least three of its kingdoms, so I run from place to place with nothing but the clothes on my back and a knife I happened to filch off my most recent opponent when he wasn’t looking. I’m a one-man army and I know it, so I take stupid risks with my life every day.”

“That’s not fair.” Gwaine is watching the song stutter.

Merlin’s voice is bitter and insistent. “And I laugh about it. Why always laughing? Laugh, Gwaine, laugh(3), so you don’t have to face anything but the next tankard of mead and the next morning’s bruises. Do you think I don’t know? I’ve seen you push on broken ribs so hard you nearly pass out, looking at me and smiling. I’ve seen you get up, bleeding, and brush off the offer of a bandage. Wherever it hurts, Gwaine, I think you want it to hurt anywhere else.”

“Merlin.”

“You’re running away, and I can’t begin to understand it.”

“You got all that just from looking at me?” Gwaine asks.

“I’ve known you for years.” Merlin reaches for a branch hanging at eye level and strips it of it leaves, while Gwaine sidesteps into the river. The dark shape of Merlin’s back, even his scarf dulled by night, looms like a dream. “You’re not as subtle as you think.”

They walk slowly, Merlin feeling with callused soles while shrubbery cracks under Gwaine’s boots and thorns scrape their arms through their shirts. A fox pushes through the underbrush a few yards ahead and stops, its eyes wet and wide, its nose twitching, staring at them. Gwaine and Merlin still as one.

“Tell me where it hurts,” says Merlin.

The fox dips back into the night, but Gwaine can hear it scurrying ahead of them, leaving footprints a part of him wants to follow. The night is alive with the sounds of its progress, but Merlin and Gwaine don’t move. Now that Merlin has answered, Gwaine doesn’t know where the song goes. His voice is scratchy when he says, “It doesn’t, not anymore.”

Merlin says, “That’s not true.”

“No,” says Gwaine. But now that Merlin has answered, Gwaine doesn’t know how to put on a show. “But I want it to be.”

They find their way into a clearing. This early in the evening, the grass is still dry. Merlin strips his jacket and lies down with his bare arms spread in the moonlight. Gwaine can see the lines of his palms.

“If I ever stopped laughing,” says Gwaine, still standing, head tipped back to the stars, “I think it would tear me apart worse than an axe and block(3). Which, by the way, I always figured was coming for me. You know as well as I do what it’s like to live on the edge of death.”

Merlin sighs, and Gwaine can see his breath in the air. “It’s exhausting.”

“Maybe, but it’s also exhilarating.”

“You’re never going to give it up, are you?” Merlin reaches a hand up, and, when Gwaine grips it like he grips the other knights, Merlin pulls Gwaine down.

Gwaine’s back hits the grass and he laughs. Above him, the stars are dizzying and dazzling; beside him, Merlin’s eyes and teeth glowing in the moonlight. The clearing looks like magic, bright and silver.

“Not a chance, Dragonlord.”

Somewhere the fox, its den and its cubs waiting in the warm earth. Somewhere Arthur with his throat raw from hollering Merlin’s name, the stew cooked poorly, the horses still hitched. And Gwaine realizes why he cannot find the song in his own mouth; it is because Merlin, staring up at the sky with teeth parted, is holding it it in his.

**Author's Note:**

> References:  
> (1) - Shakespeare, Henry V  
> (2) - Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch  
> (3) - Neal Shusterman, Unwind


End file.
